On November 5th, 2013, Columbia University Professor Jeffrey Sachs, one of the world’s leading developmental economists and a member of the Board of Advisors of the Center for International Relations and Sustainable Development (CIRSD), delivered a lecture at the University of Belgrade Faculty of Law entitled “The Challenge of the Century: The World in the Era of Sustainable Development.”
Addressing a crowd of several hundred faculty and students, Professor Sachs spoke of the latest scientific discoveries with regards to climate change and underlined the risks associated with a continued rise in social inequalities across the globe, concluding that “we need to make a rapid and dramatic shift in the way the world works—we’ve got to make the shift to universal sustainability in order to ensure our survival and the survival of the planet.”
He underscored the critical importance of the UN’s post-2015 agenda, which aims to comprehensively integrate the three dimensions of development (economic, social, and environmental) into a single sustainable whole. He added that much preparatory work still needed to be done to set the world on a path to sustainability, requiring States, the private sector, scientists, academics and civil society to work more closely together in the time to come.
